I'm in this project:
A web page that's gonna be used by the front-end company people to query and update data from a SQL DB.
I'm working with visual studio and the code behind (C#) is almost done, so the interactions between SQL and C# are ok.
My original idea was to work with ASP.NET which is familiar to me, but that's not gonna be possible. I have to switch to PHP.
So, today is my first day learning PHP, checking http://php.net/manual/en/index.php and a lot of things seem quite similar to ASP.NET so I guess it won't be that hard.
Anyways, some questions popped up quite fast as I wanted to script something else than a "hello world".
Is there an easy way to get/send C# variables from my class using a php page? I've read soemthing about using XML in order to do so, but still I'm scratching my head, is there another, easier, way to do this?
You have options.
direct integration. PHP can instantiate and use .NET objects . See the DOTNET library in PHP. So if you run PHP on Windows, and you expose your .NET logic according to the requirements of the PHP DOTNET infrastructure, then you can just call .NET classes directly from PHP. Some restrictions: PHP is built to integrate with the .NET 2.0 runtime. You can't build .NET 4.0 objects and connect to them from PHP.
synchronous network protocols. As others have suggested you can expose your C# logic via aREST or web services interface, then invoke those services from PHP using the curl library or file_get_contents(). The C# logic could be, but need not be, publicly exposed. In other words, you could make it accessible only from within the firewall of your app, so that no anonymous public access is possible. on the other hand your architecture may call for access to the same API from 3rd-party or user apps. In that case it needs to be exposed publicly.
in either case, public or private, you will want to use WCF or ASPNET MVC to expose these services implemented in C#.
asynchronous mechanisms. PHP can connect to MSMQ. See Using PHP to Open MSMQ Queues . Of course C# can do likewise. You could use MSMQ as a buffering communication mechanism between the two worlds. To do this you'd need to come up with a data serialization protocol, for the messages you put and get on the queue. JSON or XML would be appropriate choices here.
Database. If you are concerned about employing MSMQ as it is "one more piece of infrastructure to manage" you can also employ a database as a go-between. A shared database can be accessed by both PHP and C# and used as a message queue or communication conduit. PHP inserts messages in a MySQL Table, and the C# app could read and process them, then place reply messages in a different table. This would require some work by you to design the message formats, protocols, indexes, and request/reply correlation mechanism. But it relies on proven, existing technology that you already know how to use.
Finally, there is Phalanger. This lets you compile PHP onto the .NET Framework. This means integration between C# and PHP will be simple. I haven't tried this but it might satisfy your requirements.
Related
Has anyone worked with mongodb from within Silverlight? What driver did you use? Silverlight supports only asynchronous sockets; but it looks like available C# drivers are synchronous.
Believe it or not, my first project with MongoDB was in Silverlight. IronPython, some C#. This was in 2009 and we went live with something like 0.8 or 0.9 of MongoDB ... so it has been awhile.
This was I think 2.x Silverlight so it was harder to accomplish things like direct database connections. That said, I would recommend still going the route that I went at the time.
Use a REST+JSON API on your server end and have your client communicate through that. We did ours in Python, but there are these days a few awesome prebuilt Mongo REST Interfaces like Sleepy Mongoose if you don't want to roll your own.
The biggest advantage of this is the question of security: with a direct database connection from client to server even with authentication you run the risk of the user getting into your database... at which point they can do anything they want as MongoDB Authentication restricts access at a DB level, but not what people can see or delete. This doesn't even require disassembling code in some cases as there are, as I recall, development browser plugins that let you script a running Silverlight app from IronPython and IronRuby.
There are other reasons including the synchronous question, but overall I think having a serverside interface to Mongo with a clean, secured facade that talks to Silverlight would serve you better.
It'd probably be best to use the official 10gen MongoDB C# driver on the server with a lightweight web API sitting over it that can be consumed by your Silverlight app with WCF, SOAP, REST, etc.
This not seems to be a good practice to access the mongoDB from silverlight.
I suggest you to wrap all your commands in a clean WCF service (maybe a data service), and completely abstract the mongo plumbing.
this will allow you to control exactly what kind of operation can be done, who can execute the command, and with an evolutive protocol.
What "technology" would you suggest to exchange some kind of messages between a Java server and several clients written in C#, Javascript and Java?
The background story:
In our current project we're trying to build a generic UI backend in Java (running on the server) which is then "bridged" into several UI frontends by means of different UI adaptors (running on the client, the server, or both). While our server technology will always be Java, there will be C# (Silverlight), JavaScript and Java clients. Maybe even more in the future (different Smartphones, Tablets).
The UI backend and UI frontends communicate through a bunch of more or less simple messages (mostly name/value-pairs) each of which encapsulates a specific property/state/data change on the client or server respectively. Within a single request cycle, several such simple messages are aggregated into one big message which is then passed from backend to frontend or vice versa. At the moment sending and receiving messages is done at a single entry point on the client as well as on the server. So there are no server methods exposed as WebService etc. - simply because this would most definitely be to slow in our case.
Our current prototype consists solely of a Java server, a Java Desktop Client (Swing) and a Java Web Client (Vaadin). The message exchanged between backend and frontend is effectively a list of POJOs (each representing a specific "change") serialized/deserialized to/from XML. So far, so good.
Now C# and Javascript come to the table. Since we want to work with some kind of object in each technology, we thought it would be a good idea to specify the messages/changes/pojos in some kind of abstract language and then generate objects for each target language. At some point these objects could then be serialized/deserialized and sent over the wire (probably via http/s). For this purpose we thought of Google's protocol buffers or Thrift. What do you think?
For the moment our synchronous request-response-cycle is enough but we will need asynchronous request-response or server-push respectively pretty soon. That's why we thought of using something like ActiveMQ straight away. What do you think? Too much? If not, how can we accomplish the object generation mentioned above (xsd, jaxb, ? for js)? Are there better ways? I've never used ActiveMQ but according to the website it should be possible with Java, C# (Spring.NET) and somehow with Javascript (STOMP) too. However, this seems pretty complex to me...
Any tips, hints, experiences or comments about this or related topics would be really helpful.
Thank you in advance.
I would recommend using webservices. The WSDL language defines objects and messages of your protocol in abstract form. Most modern languages like Java and C# have tools for converting WSDL to native types and libraries for handling I/O.
For the last two years i have been involved in building a similar system: backend for our project is c#, java and bunch of other languages, frontend is phone clients for ios, android, symbian, all the common webbrowsers and even windows desktop apps.
For all these services we use JSON, since it seems to be most widely supported format across all languages and platforms, it decodes fairly fast on the clients compared to xml based solution (esp. webbrowsers/javascript) and it has a pretty low overhead that compresses extremely well which is great for clients that lack bandwidth.
I'm writing a small c# console application that needs to interogate Websphere Application Server ND (6.1) to retrieve a list of installed apps.
I can easily do this from the command line using the wsadmin command, but don't really want to launch wsadmin from my c# app.
Is there a way to natively get c# to talk to Websphere and get this sort of information ?
Wsadmin is just a scripting interface for JMX and everything you can do with it can be done with RMI and SOAP. For C# users that means querying for Management Beans via SOAP.
However there are no turn-key solutions available. What has been suggested before has been at least taking a look at the ws-jmx-connector and implementing your own library. You could probably easier just capture one of those queries with ie. SoapUI and replay the SOAP calls. This probably means too much work and that's probably also why there are no ready solutions.
Also, you could just read the XML files that describe the (properly) installed WebSpehre Application Server applications. That is probably much easier, and works just fine. Take a look at the server profile directory. You should see a directory called config, then under it cells, your management cell's name and under that you will find XML files that actually contain every setting you see in the management console. They are well parseable by the standard .NET libraries and a few of those will contain application lists. Take a look at serverindex.xml for instance.
Is there any way to have apache "pass" the request it takes to a c# "application" to handle, allowing it to return specific content. I want to handle an intense amount of asynchronous calls to apache via javascript and have these calls routed through c# (much the way asp.net does). Has anyone successfully done this before? Any idea where to start looking?
Update:
Some more information. I want to be able to handle thousands of concurrent asynchronous requests as fast as can possibly occur writing the interpreting agent in some kind of threaded c# application. I could be wrong, but I dont think that iis with asp.net is tailored for this sort of thing (a proof of concept would be great).
I feel that going with something like apache would be better suited. If that means going from something else to c# first is fine I guess, but I would like to be more direct.
Apache actually supports running C# libraries using mod mono. Also, you could use CURL to send a web request to C# running on IIS. Another way would be to open a server socket directly in C#, and have apache (via php, python, or some other scripting language) connect to you C# application to handle the request. I think you need to be more specific about what exactly you are trying to accomplish.
with apache2, you could run mod_aspdotnet
or if it suits you, run some urls in proxy mode (pass them to another asp.net server), using mod_proxy
or Kibbee's excellent solution
I am developing a Flex / Flash application which talks to an ASP.Net / C# backend. Is there any way I can share code between the two?
The server provides a reasonably interesting domain model which the client is designed to maniuplate. Ideally I would like to be able to define this domain model once and have both sides use it for consistency. I am after all the benefits that come with being DRY.
I'm new to Flex but the sort of thing I had in mind was some intermediate language that compile to both C# and ActionScript.
Update
I currently have a basic REST style web service which sends XML serialized versions of the objects down the wire to Flex. This works fine but what I am really interested in is being able to share simple business logic that goes along with these objects. There are certain business rules that need to be processed on both the server and the client and is possible I would prefer not to have to call back to the server for performance reasons.
I faced this problem as well, so I wrote a C# to ActionScript converter.
http://cs2as.codeplex.com/
Write your logic in C#, and add this utility as a post-build step. Then your business logic will be available in both environments. It works very well for me - I'm using it to share over 30,000 lines of code.
I'd hack together a domain model specification and have it generate models in both languages. But that's probably not the most time-effective thing to do.
Check out http://www.fluorinefx.com/ (It is open source flash remoting). I have used it extensively to call web services written in C# from ActionScript, and it works great. Once nice thing is that your c# can return a DataSet (or something similar) and the Flourine framework will convert that into an object ActionScript understands.
Not that I'm aware of, C# is essentially a strongly-typed, compiled language and ActionScript is a loosely-typed, interpreted language. Chalk and cheese I'm afraid.
What if you serialize the objects to XML and send them to Flex....that would at least let you share the data
Update
You can pass objects through the use of Lists, but what you're really passing through is just the data.
You can't really pass a 'method' to a client.
They don't necessarily have to honor it. Once they're in possession of the data, you can't control whether they honor the methods you passed or not.
You wouldn't want to trust anything they send back to you subsequently.
I think the issue is with the set-up.
You can process anything you want on the client side using ActionScript, and you'll just have to put the business logic you want to manipulate in the ActionScript side of things if you want to do it on the client-side.
Olde Answer
I use Flex and C# together through the use of a web service layer.
You may want to look at creating web services to have flex talk to your C# code.
Web Services with ASP.NET
CodePlex ASP.NET Tutorial (web services)
try weborb # http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/weborb-for-net/overview.html